Humans never landed a foot on Mars, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get a grasp of how other planets and celestial objects are looking from our neighboring planet. Actually, humanity never went to another planet, but we have high hopes that this will change in the near future. Space agencies like NASA and SpaceX are seriously considering the idea of building a colony on Mars in the far future.
But if we’ll ever be living on the Red Planet, we should become familiar with how the night sky looks from it. This seems to be what the European Space Agency (ESA) had in mind since they appointed their Mars Express spacecraft to take a look into space from Mars. You can admire the outcome below in all its glory:
The gas giants as seen from Mars!
As part of geometric calibrations, some days ago our @esamarswebcam on Mars Express observed Jupiter and Saturn in conjunction. This GIF of the observation shows the movement of the 2 planets (Jupiter moves faster because it is closer), pic.twitter.com/At5SmvbVrf— ESA Operations (@esaoperations) April 6, 2020
The Mars Express spacecraft has been circling Mars since almost two decades ago. It’s packed with the Visual Monitoring Camera, the tool used to capture the amazing footage. ESA wrote:
Current geometry for the camera is good,
But the team are trying to acquire more deep-sky images to cover uniformly the sensor and reduce uncertainties.
Short intro about Jupiter and Saturn
The two planets are made almost entirely of gas, and they are the biggest planets from our Solar System. Jupiter is Mars’ ‘neighbor’ and also the first biggest planet. This gas giant has a diameter of about 88,695 miles (142,800 kilometers), which means over 11 times the diameter of Earth. The volume of Jupiter is over 1,300 times the volume of our planet. This means that more than 1,300 planets the exact same size as Earth could fit inside Jupiter.
Saturn has an orbital period of 29 years, and it’s distinguished especially for the rings surrounding the planet. With 120,536 km for its equatorial diameter, this means that it’s about 9.5 times bigger than the one Earth has. Saturn’s volume is also 764 times bigger than the one our planet has.
Yes, going to Mars one day is a good idea, but we should be well aware of what behemoths of the Solar System we would have closer to us.
